The only way I could access the GMX Mediacenter on my Ubuntu Feisty install was by using Konqueror. Nautilus or mount with davfs aborted with errors. This is caused by the buggy/non-standard GMX WebDAV Server. Installing the current Debian unstable package makes access possible.

2007/05/23

Last.fm just keeps getting better and better! In their May 2007 news announcement they present their extended full length track streaming offers.
Before that AFAIK you could only hear all streamable tracks full length when having subscribed (for free) by listening to a last.fm radio station (neighbour radio for example). There were very few songs, that could be listened full length by everyone.

Now any (unsubscribed) visitor can tune in to their own full length track radio station for any artist or tag etc.! Try for yourself!

This is an update to my previous posting about Ubuntu Feisty Fawn problems. Most have been resolved, some only further analyzed.

Automount for smb shares (preferably with cifs)

Mounting of Windows XP and Fedora Samba (Browse and Domain Master and Wins Server) shares could finally be solved by using smbfs as filesystem type.
The strange thing is, when mounting via commandline neither specifying smbfs nor cifs did work correctly. But when leaving the filesystem option out, it worked and was mounted automatically as smbfs:

The automount map provided with Ubuntu did not work (uses cifs). As I already had tried another map as described at HowtoForge, I used that one and simply set it to use smbfs instead of cifs. And voila, shares being correctly mounted!

Note there’ll have to be credential files for each host named /etc/auto.smb.hostname and you’ll have to set the needed user/group in the mountopts variable above.

To have the other clients (than the Browse Master) mounted by host name and not IP address (i.e. /samba/someclient instead of /samba/192.168.0.123), I had to configure Samba on my Ubuntu box to use the Fedora machine as Wins Server. Not sure if that’s really necessary. Might be the Firewall blocking broadcasts, but on the other hand I had disabled the Firewall completely during tests IIRC.

I’m still wondering, why it didn’t work right out of the box. Other people don’t seem to have these problems. The error was quite strange. The mount command succeeded, but the shares only contained infinite empty folders like this:

What’s still missing in my keyboard setup for the terminal is the possibility, to switch between insert and overwrite mode using the Ins key. Also the special character keys (like “ß” or “°”) using the normal text terminal (not via X) are not accessible. But scrolling to the first and last bash history entry with PageUp and PageDown does work now with the following changes.

Other things still prevail, but I didn’t investigate yet. Whats annoying with the Tab Completition is, that it wouldn’t complete something like ~/*.txt. When there are possible alternations in the middle of a word/path, completition won’t work. But it was working under Fedora.

And regarding vim, whenever I’m in Insert Mode, using Ctrl+Left or Ctrl+Right results in a new line with some Escape Sequences garbage, instead of jumping to the previous/next word. There’s probably more differences, but I’ll simply have to compare my old Fedora vim config to the Ubuntu one.

A working ssh-agent and gpg-agent setup (preferably with Seahorse)

The integration of Seahorse (seahorse-1.0.1-0ubuntu1) seems to be in an early stage and buggy. I couldn’t manage to get it coexisting with gpg-agent and ssh-agent. The agent wouldn’t be found, would crash or stall, or simply won’t process the passwords I typed. The best thing would be, to drop Seahorse and simply use the two standard agents.

Crackling sound with Amarok and web streams (xine engine)

I found the noise to be coming from the ogg decoder plugin of xine (libxine1-1.1.4-2ubuntu3) and only for files with low sample frequency. When playing the same file or stream (used this for testing) with mplayer it sounded perfect. I played a little with the ~/.xine/config lowering the priority of the ogg plugin and also removed /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.4/xineplug_dmx_ogg.so, but there’s no other plugin available for ogg decoding on my system (shouldn’t ffmpeg be able to do that?). Then I rebuilt the libxine1 packages, but sadly the sound was as bad as with the official build. So, I hope there’ll soon be a fixed libxine1 package or alternatively build my own with the needed modifications (new ogg/vorbis libs?).

A few things when switching to Ubuntu weren’t working out of the box as I’d liked. Some still aren’t. The maybe not that trivial or obvious fixes are listed here.

Evolution Spamassassin Plugin

The bogofilter plugin must be disabled, else spamassassin plugin won’t work. Only one of the two spamfilter plugins may be enabled.
I’ve installed spamassassin and spamc packages with service spamd running.

GnuCash HBCI Support

The Ubuntu and Debian packages don’t include HBCI/FinTS support used for online banking. I had already installed aqbanking and QBankManager, but meanwhile there’s the apt repo geole.info which provides the GnuCash HBCI functionality for Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty.
This should install all required packages for GnuCash HBCI from geole:

aptitude install gnucash-aqbanking-hbci

Amarok German Localization

After I installed language-pack-kde-de Amarok speaks German.

Hide Gnome Printer Applet

The tray icons for installed printers are permanently shown and eat up my precious screen space. I think the following shouldThis will get the behaviour I know from Fedora, that the icons are only displayed when I ran a print job. But I haven’t tested that yet!
System > Settings > Sessions: untick “print queue applet”

Azureus with Sun Java

I’ve installed Sun JDK (also containing the JRE) and set /usr/bin/java to point to the Sun version. Azureus for Sun Java installed via apt-get was crashing regularly. Using the binary release from the Azureus project website did the trick.
I even rebuilt the Ubuntu Azureus package, but the result was as unstable as with the apt version.

I switched my home PC from Fedora Core 5 to Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on Sunday, which went quite smoothly and satisfying. Aside, the currently available hddtemp package (0.3-beta15-33) of Ubuntu 7.04 is not capable of reading temperatures of SATA drives. I found that bug report, after fiddeling with the configuration files and init scripts.

The hddtemp daemon was restarted with the installation. Test daemon output:

netcat localhost 7634
|/dev/sda|ST3250823AS|43|C|

Maybe I could just have installed the binary Debian package or just wait for the Ubuntu package to be updated. But as I’m new to the Debian world, having mainly used Red Hat style Linux until now, I see this as an exercise. Mixing apt repositories for Ubuntu with Debian ones is not recommended as far as I understand.